When the city of Rome fell to Alaric’s Goths in 410 CE, panicked citizens blamed the Christians. The old gods, they argued, had protected Rome for centuries, and abandoning them for Christianity had invited disaster. St. Augustine of Hippo answered this charge with one of the most influential works in political philosophy, The City of God. Buried within its 22 books is a question that still shapes debates about religion and politics today: what makes a state truly just, and can any earthly government actually achieve justice? Augustine’s answer was radical for his time and remains provocative now.
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What justice meant to Augustine
Augustine inherited a well-established classical definition of justice: giving every person their due. This idea, suum cuique, had circulated among Greek and Roman thinkers for centuries. But Augustine did something unusual with it. He extended the definition upward, toward God.
For Augustine, if justice means giving everyone what they are owed, then the highest debt of all is owed to God, the creator and source of everything. A state that ignores this debt cannot be fully just, no matter how orderly its courts or how fair its laws appear. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy captures his compact formulation: justice is love serving God alone and, through that, rightly governing everything else. Justice was therefore not merely a legal arrangement between citizens. It was fundamentally a matter of rightly ordered love, loving things according to their true worth, with God placed at the centre.
This is why Augustine’s concept of justice differs sharply from a purely secular one. A modern legal system can distribute rights, punish crimes, and settle disputes without ever referring to God. Augustine would call this a form of justice, but not the complete or absolute version. The full picture, in his view, required acknowledging the divine.
The two cities
To explain how justice works in the real world, Augustine introduced his famous image of two cities. These are not physical places like Rome or Jerusalem. They are two communities of people, distinguished entirely by what they love.
The City of God and the earthly city
The City of God (civitas Dei) is the community of those who love God, even to the point of disregarding themselves. The earthly city (civitas terrena) is the community of those who love themselves, even to the point of disregarding God. Augustine summed up this contrast in a famous line from Book 14: the earthly city was made by self-love reaching as far as contempt for God, while the heavenly city was made by love of God reaching as far as contempt for self.
The driving force of the earthly city is what Augustine called the libido dominandi, the lust for domination. This is the appetite for power, glory, and control that, in his diagnosis, corrupts even a society’s noblest achievements. When a community’s deepest orientation is self-interest rather than love of God, then even its pursuit of justice and peace becomes distorted.
Crucially, these two cities are not neatly separated into church and state. They are mixed together throughout history, intertwined within every nation and even within every institution, and they will only be fully sorted at the final judgment. No actual government is identical with the City of God, and the visible Church on earth is not identical with it either. This is why scholars caution against reading Augustine as simply equating the City of God with the Christian empire or the institutional Church.
Why no earthly state achieves perfect justice
Here we reach the heart of Augustine’s argument. If true justice requires giving God his due, and if every earthly society is contaminated by self-love and the lust for domination, then no state on earth can be perfectly just. Absolute justice belongs to the City of God, which finds its complete form only in eternity. As one summary of his thought puts it, true justice is fully realised only in the heavenly city, where divine law reigns supreme and lasting peace becomes possible.
This sets Augustine apart from the Greek tradition. Plato and Aristotle believed the ideal just state could, at least in principle, be built through human reason and good institutions. Augustine was far more pessimistic about human nature. Because of original sin, he argued, humans are inclined toward selfishness and conflict. A flawless political order is simply beyond our reach in this life.
His debate with Cicero
Augustine sharpened this point by challenging the Roman statesman Cicero. In Cicero’s work On the Commonwealth, the character Scipio defines a commonwealth (res publica) as the property of a people, and a people as a group bound together by a shared sense of justice and common interest. The logic that follows is strict: where there is no justice, there can be no genuine people, and therefore no true commonwealth.
Augustine accepted this logic and turned it against Rome itself. Since Rome never gave God his due, Rome lacked true justice, and so, by Cicero’s own definition, Rome was never truly a commonwealth at all. This leads to his most quoted political observation: strip away justice, and what are kingdoms except large-scale gangs of robbers? A band of criminals and an empire can look structurally similar, with leaders, rules, and divided spoils. What is meant to distinguish a legitimate state from organised crime is justice, and Augustine insisted that genuine, complete justice was missing from the pagan empire.
Relative justice and the value of the secular state
At this point it might seem that Augustine dismissed all earthly government as worthless. He did not. This is a common misreading, and getting it right is essential to understanding his actual position.
Augustine made room for what we can call relative justice. He suggested that, by a looser and more reasonable definition than Cicero’s strict one, Rome could be called a commonwealth in some degree, and that it was better governed in its earlier days than its later ones. Non-Christian and imperfect states can still establish a measure of order, restrain violence, punish wrongdoing, and secure what Augustine called temporal peace, the limited but real peace that makes ordinary life possible.
This temporal peace is genuinely valuable, even though it falls short of the eternal peace of the City of God. Augustine’s stance is often described as a form of political realism. Government is necessary precisely because human beings are fallen and prone to conflict. The state is not evil in itself. It is a remedy for sin and a restraint on chaos, even if it is never pure and always mingles justice with pride and coercion.
The Christian as pilgrim
So how should a person of faith relate to an imperfect state? Augustine’s answer was neither withdrawal nor worship of the government. He described the citizens of the City of God as pilgrims passing through the earthly cities. They use the peace and institutions of this world, obey just laws, and contribute to the common good, but without treating any earthly regime as their ultimate home or final hope. They engage in politics seriously while refusing to make an idol of the state.
This pilgrim vision had enormous consequences. It allowed Augustine to call for active Christian participation in civic life rather than passive retreat. It also planted the seeds for a distinction between spiritual and secular authority that would echo through medieval thought, shaping centuries of debate about the relationship between Church and state.
The ideal versus the imperfect
Augustine’s view of justice and the state rests on a single, persistent distinction between the ideal and the imperfect. Absolute justice, grounded in divine law and the right ordering of all loves toward God, belongs to the City of God and is realised fully only in eternity. The justice available to earthly states is always partial, mixed with self-interest, and limited by the fallen condition of humanity.
This framework does two things at once. It humbles every political order by reminding rulers and citizens that no government is the kingdom of heaven and none deserves unconditional loyalty. At the same time, it dignifies political life by treating the pursuit of order, peace, and relative justice as worthwhile, even noble, work. A state can never be perfect, Augustine teaches, but it should still strive to be just, and that striving matters.
The enduring power of this argument lies in its honesty about power. Augustine refused both the cynicism that sees politics as nothing but a struggle for domination and the utopianism that treats the right policy or the right ruler as a form of salvation. Instead, he offered a middle path: build peace knowing it will be incomplete, and work for a better commonwealth while remembering it is not the ultimate one.
What do you think? If Augustine is right that no earthly state can ever be perfectly just, does that make the pursuit of justice in government more urgent or less meaningful? And should the legitimacy of a state really depend on a moral standard it can never fully reach, or is securing basic order and relative justice enough?
References
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/St-Augustine
- https://iep.utm.edu/augustine-political-and-social-philosophy/
- https://philosophy.institute/western-philosophy/augustines-political-philosophy-city-of-god-vs-earthly-city/
- https://www.gcgi.info/archive/898-city-of-man-vs-city-of-god-why-states-fail-lessons-from-augustine
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Commonwealth_(Yonge)/Book_3
- https://www.theamericancouncil.com/article/augustines-city-of-god-and-political-order
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